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The Trump administration has been working to rollback rules instated by the Obama administration that would limit how much methane gas could be vented to the atmosphere at oil- and gas-drilling and processing operations. In a press release today, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it is proposing to relax Obama-era rules, saving the industry $484 million in avoided energy costs.

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But the EPA is expected to justify its rules with analysis. That analysis (PDF) suggests that this regulatory rollback will also come with costs in the form of 308,000 short tons of methane emitted between 2019 and 2025. For context, the Aliso Canyon gas leak three years ago represented the largest accidental release of methane in US history, and over the four months that workers struggled to plug that well, 107,000 short tons of methane are estimated to have been released.

That is a serious amount of methane with serious climate consequences in the short-run. Methane is many times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, though it decomposes in the atmosphere more quickly. Carbon dioxide sticks around in the atmosphere for a longer time, but each individual molecule of CO2 has less of a warming effect than a molecule of methane.

The EPA's own analysis also says than an additional 100,000 short tons of volatile organic compounds and 3,800 short tons of hazardous air pollutants would also be emitted, compared to keeping the existing rules in place.

Latch-key emissions

Under the Obama-era rules, oil- and gas-drilling companies and processors face requirements to monitor their methane emissions quarterly, searching for leaks that could be quietly releasing pollutants into the air. Under the newly proposed rule, the EPA only wants oil and gas companies to search for leaks semi-annually or annually. A recent study suggested that methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure are dramatically underestimated, nearly (but not quite) to the point where burning natural gas is as harmful to the environment from a climate perspective as burning coal.

The EPA's current proposed action would (PDF) not only reduce the frequency with which the oil and gas industry would have to monitor for methane leaks, it would also relax requirements for companies to have a professional engineer certify that methane emissions regulations had been met. In addition, the EPA's fact sheet suggests that the agency is considering extending the time a company has to complete an initial emissions survey after a well is placed. Currently, the rules require that a well operator has 60 days to monitor for emissions. No precise extended time period has been suggested. The EPA also suggested giving the oil and gas industry extra time to repair any gas leaks that are found.

The Trump administration has faced several legal challenges on the matter of these methane rules. The EPA under former Administrator Scott Pruitt tried to simply not enforce the Obama-era rules while it prepared the analysis for a more efficient regulatory rollback, but the agency was ordered to enforce those rules by the US Court of Appeals in 2017.

The EPA will hold a public hearing on the proposed rules in Denver, Colorado, at a date that's still to be determined.

Every time I think it can't get worse. The level of willful evil involved here is staggering. This isn't cluelessness, this is sheer "fuck the liberals and anything they care about, with no regard for what that thing is." This isn't even something that will noticeable help the fossil fuel industry, this is just "if Obama did it, we will reverse it".

The current adversarial system just pits industry vs government regulation and industry has almost every incentive to try and cut corners in a zero-sum game. It breeds a culture in industry of trying to do as little as possible to meet requirements and to maximize profit to shareholders.

There ought to be a way to incentivize good behavior instead of just limiting & punishing bad. Cap & Trade was an attempt at this for carbon, but there are a whole host of pollutants that need a similar or wholistic system. If there was a system that made it profitable to develop pollution negative processes, it would also be in shareholders' best interest to pursue it.

That said, it seems any such system would be artificial in the short term and subject to manipulation by industry trying to short circuit the system instead of playing within it.

The fact is that we don't have a functioning EPA with Trump as President. The fact is that it's going to take years or decades to rebuild the agency after his goons gut it (and they already have).

To that point, it isn't simply waving regulatory and legal wands to get back in to place protectionary regulations and laws (IE protecting the environment). It is also about brain drain. There are a LOT of talented, experienced and smart people running as fast as they can from such agencies because they are being literally and figuratively chased away. The kind of experience they hold takes years to rebuild.

I hate to even have to say this, but I obviously don't endorse terrorism. I don't endorse violence. I think everyone has the right to live, and no one should die for what they believe. I'm an academic, a scholar and an artist, so this has special meaning to me … given we are always the first against the wall.

I also try to respect and value all people, but that's impossible. Some people want to take things from me. Some want me dead because of what I believe. Some are engaged in actions with the ultimate goal of killing everyone that isn't them. So I flip out and check the news every 5 minutes when some guy drives his car into people* but when I see an article about 80 people killed in a bombing in the middle east, I don't even click it. Who cares? I don't have time to give a shit that a few people from Iraq are dead. They aren't "people" to me, as shitty as that sounds. I'm not HAPPY they died, but let's be honest, when I hear Iraq I think of a group of people hell bent on killing everyone who doesn't think the way they do, so maybe 80 less people like that isn't THAT bad. Even though I know that's not true about the vast majority of them, I can't stop thinking that way.

And I know that sometime in the next year there is going to be an article about a terrorist attack in the US and I'm not going to click on the article about it. For the exact same reason.

It sickens me, and I hate myself for feeling that way. But I do. More and more every time I read about the new way the US is going to make the world unlivable for my children because fuck humans.

*which has happened literally on the street outside my old apartment. My building was visible in all the news coverage.

We've reached a level of "zen" on par with 1984....The EPA doesn't care about the environmentDept. of Education doesn't care about educationAnd the president sure as hell doesn't care about the nation he's sworn to protect

Maybe if instead of leaking all that product (because that's what methane is after all) into the atmosphere they could not leak it and sell it. Because right now they are leaking their product (cutting into profit). Although I realize this is a comically small amount of money to energy companies. But imagine your boss found your truck full of servers dropped 5 servers off the back on the way to the data center; believe me you'd have a large bit taken out of your ass cheek! It wouldn't be "oh well, that's just inevitable let's pass it on to our customers" for lack of a strap to prevent them falling off...

Every time I think it can't get worse. The level of willful evil involved here is staggering. This isn't cluelessness, this is sheer "fuck the liberals and anything they care about, with no regard for what that thing is." This isn't even something that will noticeable help the fossil fuel industry, this is just "if Obama did it, we will reverse it".

Is it not evil too in believing what they are doing is truly evil, yet we still don't take EVERY action possible to stop it?

To an extent, then, we are just as responsible for the consequences that may incur.

I'll go ahead and Godwin this nonsense:

If you don't personally save every Jew you're just as responsible for the Holocaust as Hitler! -or-If you didn't personally die trying to kill Hitler, you're just as responsible....

No we're not. Actively engaging in evil is much much worse than making a futile attempt to stop the evil person.

Failing to empty your bank account (or head to a grassy knoll) to support Democrats does not make you "just as responsible" as the President and EPA staff who are now attempting to commit mass murder.

Do we have any good candidates for replacing trump in the next election? I need some hope..

These articles are heartbreaking.

I'm neither a republican nor a democrat, but I lean republican (usually vote libertarian). I watched Tulsi Gabbard on Joe Rogan last night. Even though she's sort of far left, I would vote for her over any person in either party. She's brilliant, young, patriotic and genuine.

The fact is that we don't have a functioning EPA with Trump as President. The fact is that it's going to take years or decades to rebuild the agency after his goons gut it (and they already have).

It's probably much worse than that.

Climate scientists have already made the determination that the "best case" for climate change will be twice as bad as originally thought. And that best case is predicated on adherence to the Paris Accords, from which the U.S. withdrew.

Instead of increases of 2 C by 2100, they're talking increases of 4 C, and that's "best case", which we will not have.

In looking over the models and projections, it's entirely possible (when it wasn't before) that we will displace 50-80% of the global population by 2100 (depending on how much worse it gets beyond "best case"). And that's only based on what we know. Our knowledge is growing, but we don't know everything about what's to come, since much of it is a known variable, but an unknown amount (like methane hydrates, and methane releases from rotting vegetation that used to be permafrost, for example). And those are the KNOWN variables. There's no accounting for the X factor we still don't know about (the role of which could be small or gigantic - we simply have no way to predict the unknown).

The upshot is, since we're not working on adaptation now and are focusing almost exclusively on mitigation, we'll probably be unprepared for what's coming. What's coming will also interfere with both adaptation and mitigation efforts.

The bottom line is that there is a very real possibility that civilization itself could collapse. Given our dependence on it, and on a stable, known factor for an environment, it's equally possible that if civilization collapses, mankind will go extinct. We've had "bottlenecks" in our evolutionary past, where mankind was almost wiped out. We've managed to survive that. But there's no guarantee that we will survive a future one.

So in some ways, this bullshit on the part of the EPA is both pointless in the long run (sort of like pissing into the ocean and thinking that caused the tide to come in), but also could factor into how fast climate change dissolves the foundations of our civilization, and how much more quickly we could be pushed over the edge to extinction.

Mitigation won't be enough. Adaptation has to begin, pretty much now. Mitigation will help things from going "twice as bad" to god-awful. But adaptation is mandatory to ensure the survival of our species.

Parse that howsoever you want against what's happening now, but my take is that the election of Donald J Trump may well end up causing the extinction of mankind. And that is not me being facetious in the least.

This administration’s view of climate science is like equating a witch doctor to medicine.

That's not even close to true.

Witch doctors used (and still use) the basics of the scientific method, they just had a shitty understanding of the chemistry. If a watch doctor pissed on some guys face and his cough went away he would note that "pissing on someone face cures coughs". Everything was based in sound reasoning from incorrect data. Dude is sick. People get sick because the gods are mad. You can make the gods happy by killing a ram. Blood carries "life force". Therefor, kill a ram and drink it's blood to cure sickness

The Trump administration just doesn't give a fuck. They have no reason to believe their policies will help. Everyone, even republican, note that they are short-sighted and deeply flawed. But they do them anyways. Then, when they fail exactly like everyone said they would, they don't repeal them … they publicly declare that they are working better then any policy in the history of policies, and call the "facts" fake news.